Automated speech recognition confidence classifier

ABSTRACT

A method of enhancing an automated speech recognition confidence classifier includes receiving a set of baseline confidence features from one or more decoded words, deriving word embedding confidence features from the baseline confidence features, joining the baseline confidence features with word embedding confidence features to create a feature vector, and executing the confidence classifier to generate a confidence score, wherein the confidence classifier is trained with a set of training examples having labeled features corresponding to the feature vector.

BACKGROUND

A confidence classifier is an integral component of automatic speechrecognition (ASR) systems. Classifiers predict the accuracy of an ASRhypothesis by associating a confidence score in [0,1] range, where alarger score implies higher probability of the hypothesis being correct.While such classifiers work well for native language speakers, speechwith different accents can lead to higher false alarm rates. In otherwords, the confidence score in a predicted word can be too high, leadingan application receiving the classifier output to believe the correctword has been provided.

SUMMARY

A method of enhancing an automated speech recognition confidenceclassifier includes receiving a set of baseline confidence features fromone or more decoded words, deriving word embedding confidence featuresfrom the baseline confidence features, joining the baseline confidencefeatures with word embedding confidence features to create a featurevector, and executing the confidence classifier to generate a confidencescore, wherein the confidence classifier is trained with a set oftraining examples having labeled features corresponding to the featurevector.

In a further embodiment, a system configured to perform the method. Inyet a further embodiment, a computer readable media has code storedthereon to cause a computer to perform the method when executing thecode.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

FIG. 1 is a block flow diagram illustrating an enhanced speechrecognition system having added word embedding features according to anexample embodiment.

FIG. 2 is a graph illustrating dependency of words with associatedacoustic scores according to an example embodiment.

FIG. 3 is a table illustrating character embedding for an example wordaccording to an example embodiment.

FIG. 4 is a flowchart illustrating a computer implemented method ofenhancing a speech recognition confidence classifier with word embeddingconfidence features according to an example embodiment.

FIG. 5 is a block schematic diagram of a computer system to implementone or more example embodiments.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

In the following description, reference is made to the accompanyingdrawings that form a part hereof, and in which is shown by way ofillustration specific embodiments which may be practiced. Theseembodiments are described in sufficient detail to enable those skilledin the art to practice the invention, and it is to be understood thatother embodiments may be utilized and that structural, logical andelectrical changes may be made without departing from the scope of thepresent invention. The following description of example embodiments is,therefore, not to be taken in a limited sense, and the scope of thepresent invention is defined by the appended claims.

The functions or algorithms described herein may be implemented insoftware in one embodiment. The software may consist of computerexecutable instructions stored on computer readable media or computerreadable storage device such as one or more non-transitory memories orother type of hardware based storage devices, either local or networked.Further, such functions correspond to modules, which may be software,hardware, firmware or any combination thereof. Multiple functions may beperformed in one or more modules as desired, and the embodimentsdescribed are merely examples. The software may be executed on a digitalsignal processor, ASIC, microprocessor, or other type of processoroperating on a computer system, such as a personal computer, server orother computer system, turning such computer system into a specificallyprogrammed machine.

The functionality can be configured to perform an operation using, forinstance, software, hardware, firmware, or the like. For example, thephrase “configured to” can refer to a logic circuit structure of ahardware element that is to implement the associated functionality. Thephrase “configured to” can also refer to a logic circuit structure of ahardware element that is to implement the coding design of associatedfunctionality of firmware or software. The term “module” refers to astructural element that can be implemented using any suitable hardware(e.g., a processor, among others), software (e.g., an application, amongothers), firmware, or any combination of hardware, software, andfirmware. The term, “logic” encompasses any functionality for performinga task. For instance, each operation illustrated in the flowchartscorresponds to logic for performing that operation. An operation can beperformed using, software, hardware, firmware, or the like. The terms,“component,” “system,” and the like may refer to computer-relatedentities, hardware, and software in execution, firmware, or combinationthereof. A component may be a process running on a processor, an object,an executable, a program, a function, a subroutine, a computer, or acombination of software and hardware. The term, “processor,” may referto a hardware component, such as a processing unit of a computer system.

Furthermore, the claimed subject matter may be implemented as a method,apparatus, or article of manufacture using standard programming andengineering techniques to produce software, firmware, hardware, or anycombination thereof to control a computing device to implement thedisclosed subject matter. The term, “article of manufacture,” as usedherein is intended to encompass a computer program accessible from anycomputer-readable storage device or media. Computer-readable storagemedia can include, but are not limited to, magnetic storage devices,e.g., hard disk, floppy disk, magnetic strips, optical disk, compactdisk (CD), digital versatile disk (DVD), smart cards, flash memorydevices, among others. In contrast, computer-readable media, i.e., notstorage media, may additionally include communication media such astransmission media for wireless signals and the like.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has added significantly to hands-freecommunication with devices such as smartphones, tablets, game consoles,etc. ASR technologies have been very successful in the past decade andhave seen a rapid deployment from laboratory settings to real-lifesituations.

Although perfect recognition from ASR is desired, the actual decodedutterances are invariably erroneous. In this context, a confidencemeasure on the recognized utterance provides a quantitativerepresentation on the reliability of an ASR decoding. This confidencemeasure is especially important for applications where an ASR-enableddevice is always in an active listening mode in anapplication-constrained grammar. An application-constrained grammar inone example application can consist of game media commands likeplay/pause etc. There sometimes background OOG speech (that doesn'tcontain play command) can trigger one of the IG commands, and confidencemeasure can be used to evaluate its correctness. There it is likely thatsome out-of-grammar (OOG) utterances may still be recognized as anin-grammar (IG) utterance.

Confidence classifiers are trained to provide a measure on thereliability of the decoded utterance in order to help reject OOGutterances. Confidence measures are also used for validating ASRdecoding in presence of background noise, reverberation and othermismatched acoustic conditions. Confidence measures can be trained forword-based as well as utterance-based confidences.

ASR confidences have numerous applications. Confidences are key metricsthat help speech applications better handle their responses to possiblyincorrect ASR hypothesis. Confidence classifiers are used forpush-to-talk devices like cell phones but are also used for continuouslylistening devices like Xbox, where the speech engine is always runningin background. Thus, the ASR is listening to speech intended for it aswell as unintended speech in side-speech, background noise, and otherambient sounds. There the ASR can produce in-grammar (IG) recognitionsfor unintended or out-of-grammar (OOG) utterances. ASR systems leverageconfidence classifiers to possibly detect incorrect recognitions andavoid a system response.

A multilayer perceptron (MLP) or a deep learning model may be used totrain the confidence scores from a defined set of features. Manyconfidence features and training methods have been developed and usedfor predicting confidences. Confidence scores can be computed for wordsas well as utterances. To improve the confidence scores, word embeddingconfidence features may be derived and added to the set of features.

FIG. 1 is a block flow diagram illustrating an enhanced speechrecognition system 100. Speech utterances are received at speech input110. The input sequence can be at a word level or an utterance level.Features are extracted at feature extraction 120 in a known manner. Theextracted features are provided to an ASR engine 130 that decodesspeech, and produces a hypothesis as well as a set of features, such aslattice-based confidence features 140. A lattice is a representation ofalternative word-sequences that are sufficiently likely for a particularutterance. The engine 130 provides acoustic model (AM) and languagemodel (LM)-based scores. The scores are normalized for the utterancelength. The lattice-based confidence features 140 are a baseline featureset (denoted as Generic Features) consisting of 16 predictors in oneembodiment.

The features 140 are used to derive word embedding confidence features150. The features 140 and word embedding confidence features 150 areconcatenated and provided to a confidence classifier 160 that has beentrained on both sets of features. The confidence classifier 160determines whether the input 110 sequence is in-grammar (IG) orout-of-grammar (OOG). A multi-layer perceptron (MLP) may be used for IGvs. OOG decision making. An MLP is trained for a word-level as well anutterance-level classification. The output of the MLP is the confidencescore for the input utterance.

In some embodiments, the confidence classifier 160 produces a confidencescore 170 that is provided to an application 180. The application 180may accept or reject the hypothesis. In other words, the application 180may chose to accept or ignore the word or sequence of words that werehypothesized by the engine 130 based on the confidence score.

Speech applications 180 consume these scores and make a decision onaccepting recognition events by comparing the score against a setthreshold, such as 0.8 ([0,1] range, where larger score implies higherprobability of the hypothesis being correct) or other threshold that maybe application dependent. The confidence scores help mitigateunwarranted application responses to background noise or TV sound etc.tasks.

The word embedding confidence features 150 are used to improveconfidence classifiers. Word character and phone pronunciation embeddingis used to specially represent and factorize acoustic confidencefeatures.

Confidence classification may be expressed as a binary classificationproblem with the 2-classes in: (1) correct SR recognitions, (2)incorrect recognitions that includes misrecognitions over IG utterancesas well recognitions from OOG utterances or background audio. Exampleconfidence features may include:

-   -   1. acoustic-model scores    -   2. background-model scores    -   3. silence-model and noise-model scores    -   4. language-model scores    -   5. duration features

The baseline confidence features 140 in one embodiment include 21features that are obtained from ASR lattices during decoding. Confidencefeatures may be obtained from background, silence, and noise modelscores. A set of language model (LM) features may be obtained torepresent LM score, perplexity and fanout. Duration-based features maybe included to model speaking rate and absolute speech duration. Thefeatures may be normalized to be robust to speech with differentduration and intensity.

New confidence features, such as word embedding confidence features 150,may be added to further improve the confidence performance. An acousticscore for individual words is obtained in an ASR hypothesis as anaggregation of frame-level acoustic scores for a correspondingparticular word. A stronger acoustic score indicates greater match ofthe constituent speech frames with the acoustic model, thus greaterprobability of the word being correct. ASR systems use context-dependenttied-triphones, i.e. senones, as states to represent the words. Duringdecoding, the best path is found along the states, under language modelconstraints, to predict the best hypothesis.

The per-frame acoustic score represents a match between the speech frameand the particular acoustic state. Note that the baseline confidencefeatures 140 include duration that implicitly helps explain acousticscore from smaller vs. longer words. Additionally, a number ofnormalizations of engine scores is performed on the baseline confidencefeatures. Still the acoustic scores based on the baseline confidencefeatures have a significant dependency upon the underlying acousticstates. The dependency of the acoustic score upon the underlyingacoustic states is accounted for with word embeddings by representingacoustic scores in terms of acoustic states

Acoustic scores are typically significant features for ASR confidenceclassifiers. However, a dependency between the acoustic scores andunderlying ASR states exists. A confidence classifier assigns higherconfidence score to words with stronger acoustic scores but suchdependency on acoustic scores implies that the aggregated acousticscores are insufficient at precisely representing the acoustic matchwithout representing the underlying acoustic states. Assuming alarge-scale ASR task that consists of data across acoustic conditions,speakers, and audio pipeline, considerable variation in acoustic scoresoccurs for even correctly recognized words.

In one embodiment, the dependency between a few words and associatedacoustic scores is shown in FIG. 2 in graphic form at 200. Adistribution of the acoustic score for 3 words is shown respectively at210, 220, and 230 for: “The”, “Play”, and, “Game.” A lower acousticscore indicates a stronger match. The distribution was obtained fromwords that were correctly recognized by an ASR system. Assuming the restof the confidence features to be identical, differences in acousticscores will impact confidence scores. Confidence scores indicate theprobability of the word being correct, so different acoustic scoredistributions as illustrated at 210, 220, and 230 will lead to differentinterpretation for “The” and “Play” words for any given confidencescore. For example, the recognized word “The” at confidence of 0.9, mayhave higher or lower probability of being correct than the word “Play”at confidence 0.9.

Word embedding features are used to represent and rationalize acousticscore in acoustic states. Two different types of word embeddingfeatures, word character embedding and phone pronunciation embedding maybe used. The different types of word embedding features may be usedalone or in combination, and are added to the baseline confidencefeatures 140 described above.

Word character embedding may be used to represent and factorize acousticscores. The word character embedding in one embodiment is simply a countof the letters in the language. For enUS (English United States), a26-dimensional character embedding is built, corresponding to eachletter. Other languages may have a different number of letters andcorresponding different number of dimensional character embedding. enUSis based on the Roman alphabet. Other common alphabets with differingnumber of letters include Arabic, Cyrillic, and Latin. In furtherembodiments, less than all the letters may be used for word characterembedding. Some applications may select a subset of the letters in acorresponding language for word character embedding to minimallyincrease the complexity or size of the model. For example, fiveembeddings from vowels may be used.

Referring to as shown in FIG. 3 at Table 300, Table. 1, the characterembedding for “cortana” at 310 is a vector with {2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1} atrespective locations for {‘a’, ‘c’, ‘n’, ‘o’, ‘r’, ‘t’}. The rest of thevector elements are 0. The “2” in the vector illustrates that the letter“a” has two occurrences in “cortana.”

Character embedding offers several advantages: (a) they are smallerdimensional features, (b) they require little computing resource, (c)are easily computed on the fly, and don't require any memory or storage,as the character count for a word can be trivially computed when neededwithout the need to store character embeddings. As shown in FIG. 1 at100, an existing confidence mechanism is expanded by extracting baselineconfidence features from ASR lattices, features 140. A specific word isused for character embedding. Functionality is embedded in the latticegeneration or lattice post-processing steps to compute characterembedding for the words in the ASR hypothesis included with features140. ASR systems essentially model phones, and the character embeddingis at best a good approximation. Furthermore, “Cortana” pronounced indifferent ways will have identical character embeddings, despitedifferent acoustic scores. Given that, phone embedding, described belowmay also or alternatively be used to expand the features provided to theconfidence classifier 160.

An ASR system is essentially a match between the speech frames andacoustic states under language model constraints. In some examples, 9000context-dependent triphones may be used to represent acoustic states. A9000-dimensional vector may be used to represent a count of each of thetriphones in a word but that is significantly larger than the 21confidence features in one example set of baseline confidence features140, and will likely overfit the task. Such a large vector would alsomake it difficult to train and maintain the confidence classifier due tosparsity issues, as only a few of the states will be non-zero in a word.

In one embodiment, monophone units are used for word pronunciationembedding. The phone embedding for “cortana” is shown at 320 in Table300. The enUS ASR model consists of 40 monophones in one embodiment,with a hand-crafted monophone dictionary used to represent the words inmonophone units. The pronunciation of a word can be given as a seriessymbols that correspond to the individual units of sound that make up aword. These are called ‘phonemes’ or ‘phones’. A monophone refers to asingle phone. For example, the word “translate” may correspond to thefollowing monphones: t r@n s l e t. Monophones are a well know constructin speech recognition. As with word character embedding, fewer than 40monophones may be used in some embodiments.

Phone embedding retains all the advantages of character embedding. Withcharacter embedding, there is an issue with identical characterembedding for different pronunciations of a word. Phone embeddingsaddress that issues by allowing multiple pronunciations for words in adictionary. The computation for phone embedding is similar to that forcharacter embedding except that the embedding units are phones.Embedding for multiple pronunciations for a word may be calculated as anaverage over the embedding from individual pronunciations. Thiscomputation simply uses the specific word and the monophone dictionary,that the ASR decoding already has access to.

In one example, OOG utterances may be prepared from movie or meetingtasks. OOG data may be simulated by decoding IG utterances against amismatched grammar. The performance of the confidence classifier may becharacterized in terms of mean squared error (MSE) on training andvalidation tasks, as well as in terms of CA=# AllCorrects beyond athreshold # AllCorrects, and, FA=# AllIncorrects beyond a threshold #AllIncorrects, there # indicates count.

To train the confidence classifier 160, labeled confidence training dataof over 1000 hrs of speech for one or more applications, such as Xboxand Server may be used. Significantly smaller or larger amounts ortraining data may be used in further embodiments. The combination ofacoustic and character embedding may improve the MSE to 0:199.Furthermore, integrating the embedding with all the baseline featuresimproves the MSE from 0:188 to 0:183.

In one embodiment, the confidence classifier is an MLP classifier. TheMLP classifier may be enhanced by using deep-architectures in DNNs andK-DCN. Deep neural networks (DNN) are widely being used instate-of-the-art learning systems. DNNs extend ML in terms of a largernumber of hidden layers. The different hidden layers can model and learnlocal as well as higherorder structures in the data.

A Kernel Deep Convex Network (K-DCN) is a kernel version of the deepconvex network (DCN). The architecture of DCN and K-DCN concatenatesoutputs from all previous layers and the original input data as an inputto the current layer. K-DCN consists of a kernel ridge regressionmodule, which can be expressed as:

$\begin{matrix}{{f(x)} = {{\sum\limits_{i = 1}^{N}{\alpha_{i}{k( {x,x_{i}} )}}} = {{k(x)}^{T}\alpha}}} & (1)\end{matrix}$

where a sample x is evaluated with respect to all the training samples{x_(i)}_(i=1) ^(N), α is the regression coefficient, and vector k(x) iswith element k_(n)(x)=k(x_(n); x). The regression coefficient α has aclosed form solution:

α=(λI+K)⁻¹ Y  (2)

where λ is the regularization parameter, Kϵ

^(N×N) is a kernel matrix with elements K_(mn)=k(x_(m),x_(n)),{x_(i)}_(i=1) ^(N) are from the training set, and Y=[y₁, . . . ,y_(N)]^(T)ϵ

^(N+M) are the M-class label vectors for training.

In a further embodiment, Glove embeddings may be added to the baselinefeatures in addition to one or more of the word embedding confidencefeatures. Glove embeddings encode contextual word information. Suchembeddings are distinct from the character and phone embeddings.

FIG. 4 is a flowchart illustrating a computer implemented method 400 ofenhancing a speech recognition confidence classifier with word embeddingconfidence features. Method 400 begins by receiving a set of baselineconfidence features from one or more decoded words at operation 410.Word embedding confidence features are derived at operation 420 from thebaseline confidence features. The word embedding confidence featurescomprise character embeddings. The character embeddings comprise 26embeddings comprising the letters in the English alphabet. The characterembedding for a word may be in the form of a vector having values foreach letter consisting of the count of the number of each letter in theword. Values in the vector corresponding to letter not in the word orother utterance may be set to zero.

The word embedding confidence may also be or include features comprisingphone embeddings. The phone embeddings may be monophones selected from adictionary comprising 40 monophones. The word embedding confidencefeatures may include both character embeddings and phone embeddings. Ina further example, the

The baseline confidence features are joined with the word embeddingconfidence features at operation 430 to create a feature vector. Atoperation 430, the confidence classifier is executed to generate aconfidence score. The confidence classifier is trained with a set oftraining examples having labeled features corresponding to the featurevector. The feature vector may also include GLOVE embeddings.

The confidence classifier may be trained for word-level as well anutterance-level classification. The baseline features may include two ormore of acoustic-model scores, background-model scores, silence-modelscores, noise-model scores, language model scores, and durationfeatures.

FIG. 5 is a block schematic diagram of a computer system 500 toimplement an improved ASR confidence classifier algorithms according toexample embodiments. All components need not be used in variousembodiments.

One example computing device in the form of a computer 500 may include aprocessing unit 502, memory 503, removable storage 510, andnon-removable storage 512. Although the example computing device isillustrated and described as computer 500, the computing device may bein different forms in different embodiments. For example, the computingdevice may instead be a smartphone, a tablet, smartwatch, smart storagedevice (SSD), or other computing device including the same or similarelements as illustrated and described with regard to FIG. 5. Devices,such as smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches, are generallycollectively referred to as mobile devices or user equipment.

Although the various data storage elements are illustrated as part ofthe computer 500, the storage may also or alternatively includecloud-based storage accessible via a network, such as the Internet orserver based storage. Note also that an SSD may include a processor onwhich the parser may be run, allowing transfer of parsed, filtered datathrough I/O channels between the SSD and main memory.

Memory 503 may include volatile memory 514 and non-volatile memory 508.Computer 500 may include—or have access to a computing environment thatincludes—a variety of computer-readable media, such as volatile memory514 and non-volatile memory 508, removable storage 510 and non-removablestorage 512. Computer storage includes random access memory (RAM), readonly memory (ROM), erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM) orelectrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM), flashmemory or other memory technologies, compact disc read-only memory (CDROM), Digital Versatile Disks (DVD) or other optical disk storage,magnetic cassettes, magnetic tape, magnetic disk storage or othermagnetic storage devices, or any other medium capable of storingcomputer-readable instructions.

Computer 500 may include or have access to a computing environment thatincludes input interface 506, output interface 504, and a communicationinterface 516. Output interface 504 may include a display device, suchas a touchscreen, that also may serve as an input device. The inputinterface 506 may include one or more of a touchscreen, touchpad, mouse,keyboard, camera, one or more device-specific buttons, one or moresensors integrated within or coupled via wired or wireless dataconnections to the computer 500, and other input devices. The computermay operate in a networked environment using a communication connectionto connect to one or more remote computers, such as database servers.The remote computer may include a personal computer (PC), server,router, network PC, a peer device or other common data flow networkswitch, or the like. The communication connection may include a LocalArea Network (LAN), a Wide Area Network (WAN), cellular, Wi-Fi,Bluetooth, or other networks. According to one embodiment, the variouscomponents of computer 500 are connected with a system bus 520.

Computer-readable instructions stored on a computer-readable medium areexecutable by the processing unit 502 of the computer 500, such as aprogram 518. The program 518 in some embodiments comprises software toimplement one or more confidence classifiers. A hard drive, CD-ROM, andRAM are some examples of articles including a non-transitorycomputer-readable medium such as a storage device. The termscomputer-readable medium and storage device do not include carrier wavesto the extent carrier waves are deemed too transitory. Storage can alsoinclude networked storage, such as a storage area network (SAN).Computer program 518 along with the workspace manager 522 may be used tocause processing unit 502 to perform one or more methods or algorithmsdescribed herein.

Examples

A method of enhancing an automated speech recognition confidenceclassifier includes receiving a set of baseline confidence features fromone or more decoded words, deriving word embedding confidence featuresfrom the baseline confidence features, joining the baseline confidencefeatures with word embedding confidence features to create a featurevector, and executing the confidence classifier to generate a confidencescore, wherein the confidence classifier is trained with a set oftraining examples having labeled features corresponding to the featurevector.

2. The method of example 1 wherein the word embedding confidencefeatures comprise character embeddings.

3. The method of example 2 wherein the character embeddings compriseless than 26 embeddings comprising letters.

4. The method of any of examples 2-3 wherein the character embedding fora word comprises a vector having values for each letter consisting ofthe count of the number of each letter in the word.

5. The method of any of examples 1-4 wherein the word embeddingconfidence features comprise phone embeddings.

6. The method of example 5 wherein the phone embeddings comprisemonophones selected from a dictionary comprising 40 or fewer monophones.

7. The method of any of examples 1-6 wherein the word embeddingconfidence features comprise character embeddings and phone embeddings.

8. The method of any of examples 1-7 wherein the feature vector furthercomprises GLOVE embeddings.

9. The method of any of examples 1-8 wherein the confidence classifieris trained for word-level as well an utterance-level classification.

10. The method of any of examples 1-9 wherein the baseline featurescomprise two or more of acoustic-model scores, background-model scores,silence-model scores, noise-model scores, language model scores, andduration features.

11. A machine-readable storage device having instructions for executionby a processor of a machine to cause the processor to perform operationsto generate a confidence score for a word or utterance. The operationsinclude receiving a set of baseline confidence features from one or moredecoded words, deriving word embedding confidence features from thebaseline confidence features, joining the baseline confidence featureswith word embedding confidence features to create a feature vector, andexecuting the confidence classifier to generate a confidence score,wherein the confidence classifier is trained with a set of trainingexamples having labeled features corresponding to the feature vector.

12. The device of example 11 wherein the word embedding confidencefeatures comprise character embeddings.

13. The device of example 12 wherein the character embeddings comprise26 or fewer embeddings comprising letters in an alphabet.

14. The device of any of examples 12-13 wherein the character embeddingfor a word comprises a vector having values for each letter consistingof the count of the number of each letter in the word.

15. The device of any of examples 11-14 wherein the word embeddingconfidence features comprise phone embeddings including monophonesselected from a dictionary comprising 40 or fewer monophones.

16. The device of any of examples 11-15 wherein the word embeddingconfidence features comprise character embeddings and phone embeddings.

17. The device of any of examples 11-16 wherein the confidenceclassifier is trained for word-level as well an utterance-levelclassification and wherein the baseline features comprise two or more ofacoustic-model scores, background-model scores, silence-model scores,noise-model scores, language model scores, and duration features.

18. A device includes a processor and a memory device coupled to theprocessor and having a program stored thereon for execution by theprocessor to perform operations. The operations include receiving a setof baseline confidence features from one or more decoded words, derivingword embedding confidence features from the baseline confidencefeatures, joining the baseline confidence features with word embeddingconfidence features to create a feature vector, and executing theconfidence classifier to generate a confidence score, wherein theconfidence classifier is trained with a set of training examples havinglabeled features corresponding to the feature vector.

19. The device of example 18 wherein the word embedding confidencefeatures comprise one or more of character embeddings and phoneembeddings including monophones.

20. The device of any of examples 18-19 wherein the confidenceclassifier is trained for word-level as well an utterance-levelclassification and wherein the baseline features comprise two or more ofacoustic-model scores, background-model scores, silence-model scores,noise-model scores, language model scores, and duration features.

Although a few embodiments have been described in detail above, othermodifications are possible. For example, the logic flows depicted in thefigures do not require the particular order shown, or sequential order,to achieve desirable results. Other steps may be provided, or steps maybe eliminated, from the described flows, and other components may beadded to, or removed from, the described systems. Other embodiments maybe within the scope of the following claims.

1. A method of enhancing an automated speech recognition confidenceclassifier comprising: receiving a set of baseline confidence featuresfrom one or more decoded words; deriving word embedding confidencefeatures from the baseline confidence features; joining the baselineconfidence features with word embedding confidence features to create afeature vector; and executing the confidence classifier to generate aconfidence score, wherein the confidence classifier is trained with aset of training examples having labeled features corresponding to thefeature vector.
 2. The method of claim 1 wherein the word embeddingconfidence features comprise character embeddings.
 3. The method ofclaim 2 wherein the character embeddings comprise less than 26embeddings comprising letters.
 4. The method of claim 2 wherein thecharacter embedding for a word comprises a vector having values for eachletter consisting of the count of the number of each letter in the word.5. The method of claim 1 wherein the word embedding confidence featurescomprise phone embeddings.
 6. The method of claim 5 wherein the phoneembeddings comprise monophones selected from a dictionary comprising 40or fewer monophones.
 7. The method of claim 1 wherein the word embeddingconfidence features comprise character embeddings and phone embeddings.8. The method of claim 1 wherein the feature vector further comprisesGLOVE embeddings.
 9. The method of claim 1 wherein the confidenceclassifier is trained for word-level as well an utterance-levelclassification.
 10. The method of claim 1 wherein the baseline featurescomprise two or more of acoustic-model scores, background-model scores,silence-model scores, noise-model scores, language model scores, andduration features.
 11. A machine-readable storage device havinginstructions for execution by a processor of a machine to cause theprocessor to perform operations to generate a confidence score for aword or utterance, the operations comprising: receiving a set ofbaseline confidence features from one or more decoded words; derivingword embedding confidence features from the baseline confidencefeatures; joining the baseline confidence features with word embeddingconfidence features to create a feature vector; and executing theconfidence classifier to generate a confidence score, wherein theconfidence classifier is trained with a set of training examples havinglabeled features corresponding to the feature vector.
 12. The device ofclaim 11 wherein the word embedding confidence features comprisecharacter embeddings.
 13. The device of claim 12 wherein the characterembeddings comprise 26 or fewer embeddings comprising letters in analphabet.
 14. The device of claim 12 wherein the character embedding fora word comprises a vector having values for each letter consisting ofthe count of the number of each letter in the word.
 15. The device ofclaim 11 wherein the word embedding confidence features comprise phoneembeddings including monophones selected from a dictionary comprising 40or fewer monophones.
 16. The device of claim 11 wherein the wordembedding confidence features comprise character embeddings and phoneembeddings.
 17. The device of claim 11 wherein the confidence classifieris trained for word-level as well an utterance-level classification andwherein the baseline features comprise two or more of acoustic-modelscores, background-model scores, silence-model scores, noise-modelscores, language model scores, and duration features.
 18. A devicecomprising: a processor; and a memory device coupled to the processorand having a program stored thereon for execution by the processor toperform operations comprising: receiving a set of baseline confidencefeatures from one or more decoded words; deriving word embeddingconfidence features from the baseline confidence features; joining thebaseline confidence features with word embedding confidence features tocreate a feature vector; and executing the confidence classifier togenerate a confidence score, wherein the confidence classifier istrained with a set of training examples having labeled featurescorresponding to the feature vector.
 19. The device of claim 18 whereinthe word embedding confidence features comprise one or more of characterembeddings and phone embeddings including monophones.
 20. The device ofclaim 18 wherein the confidence classifier is trained for word-level aswell an utterance-level classification and wherein the baseline featurescomprise two or more of acoustic-model scores, background-model scores,silence-model scores, noise-model scores, language model scores, andduration features.